1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for controlling the Quality of Service (QoS) of a master Bluetooth® terminal in a piconet, capable of being applied to various portable devices such as personal digital assistants, laptop computers, personal computers and smart phones, using a Bluetooth® interface.
More particularly, the present invention relates to a method of enabling as many as seven slave Bluetooth® terminals to efficiently receive seamless service depending on a type and an encoding scheme of each content when the slave Bluetooth® terminals competitively download data such as music, image and text from one master Bluetooth® terminal in an environment using a Bluetooth® Personal Area Network (PAN) (hereinafter piconet) profile.
2. Description of the Related Art
Bluetooth® is technology that currently finds the most commercial use with devices in a Personal Area Network (PAN). Bluetooth® begins with IEEE 802.15.1 technology, which is presently supported and upgraded by Bluetooth® Special Interest Group (SIG).
A Bluetooth® PAN profile defined by Bluetooth® standards enables Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communication on a Bluetooth® physical layer.
Bluetooth® may establish a piconet in which one master device interconnects with up to seven slave Bluetooth® terminals, and may be configured so that, when using the PAN profile, the master device executes a web server (based on HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)) or a file server (based on File Transfer Protocol (FTP)), and the slave Bluetooth® terminals receive service provided by the master device.
The PAN profile defined by Bluetooth® standards configures the piconet to be able to refrain from performing load balancing on data transmitted from the master device to the slave Bluetooth® terminals, and is designed to operate in such a manner that a maximum transfer rate supported by a Bluetooth® interface is equally distributed to the slave Bluetooth® terminals.
The Bluetooth® PAN profile has only a control message for supporting a QoS using a Logical Link and Control Adaption Protocol (L2CAP) and a Link Manager Protocol (LMP) of a Bluetooth® protocol without a control algorithm, and is highly complex in terms of implementation.
Since the Bluetooth® PAN profile is designed to provide a uniform download speed to the slave Bluetooth® terminals, the Bluetooth® PAN profile cannot dynamically perform the load balancing when a specific slave Bluetooth® terminal performs an application that requires a higher download speed or operates at a low download speed.